Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks’...

This paper provides new evidence on the foreign direct investment stocks of German firms. We use firm-level data for the years 1990-2000 to describe the regional and sectoral patterns of German FDI through gravity-type equations. We provide evidence on the patterns of FDI by sector, by size of...

This paper studies the sectoral and geographical dimensions of the response of bank lending to sectoral growth. We use several bank-level datasets provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank for the 1996-2002 period. Our results show that bank heterogeneity affects how lending responds to domestic...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...